Posted on

Chicago Conversations

This morning, I spoke with four alumni from the University of Chicago, the institution where I received bachelor’s and master’s degrees close to fifty years ago. The experience was instructive and pleasant.

Fifty alumni signed on to a Zoom meeting. The meeting leaders then randomly paired the participants into two-person breakout rooms to talk privately for ten minutes. When the time was up, the moderators returned us to the full meeting, then paired us up randomly again. Rinse and repeat four times.

We were geographically dispersed. I’m in the northwest corner of the country next to the Salish Sea and close to the Canadian border. I first spoke with a fellow in New York whose partner is a nurse at one of the Columbia hospitals; then a Chicago architectural history graduate student locked in her parent’s apartment in a northern Chicago suburb; next a recent business and econ graduate only 160 miles south of me in the Washington State capital, Olympia; and finally, a sociology graduate student on a fellowship at Oxford in Britain.

Our experiences were widely disparate. The young woman in the Chicago suburb had not been outside in two weeks. I made her jealous by telling her about the goose sitting on her clutch of eggs on the island in the middle of the pond that Albert The Imperious Border Collie walks me around each morning and evening. The guy in New York discussed toilet paper shortages and supply-chain interruptions with me.

In breakout with the sociology grad at Oxford, we discussed the implications of the pandemic for broadband connections for the disadvantaged. I am optimistic— the network infrastructure has already been significantly strengthened in the past two months of increased network traffic. Comcast has offered two months of free broadband here. These signs generate optimism in me that we will soon see a TVA-like initiative for broadband connections. She was less enthusiastic, perhaps from her more global perspective.

For the architectural history student, I acted professorial and turned to my shelf to pull out a copy of the bible of software design patterns, which was inspired by the building architect, Christopher Alexander, who happens to be from the era she is studying. She, in turn, gave me a reference to blob architecture, which is an architectural term derived from the software term, Binary Large Object, the subject of Big Data analysis. A cross-disciplinary moment.

The business and econ major in Olympia and I discussed lobbying the Washington State legislature in Olympia for continued support for public libraries.

The pandemic bringing a diverse group closer together.

Posted on

Optimistic Pessimism

Today, I expect the worst from the covid-19 pandemic and look for the best. Nearly a million and a half confirmed cases and ninety thousand dead, fourteen thousand dead in the United States, twenty dead in our own rural county. And more to come.

For whatever reason, our wealthy and sophisticated country is not responding well. We don’t seem to be able to organize ourselves. Shortages and gaps in medical supplies are appearing in the country that invented supply-chain management. Testing is faltering at the source of testing technology.

As a world leader, we are stumbling. What else can be said? The number of cases in the U. S. is more than double that of the country with the second highest count.

The only way we have to stop the deaths is to shut the country down, and we struggle to do it. Americans cherish their freedom and do not take kindly to interference. Some insist on their right to assembly when not assembling is to avoid the death for themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, their countrymen. In the country that is of the people, by the people and for the people, the people cannot save themselves.

What do I see that is good in this? Yes, healthcare staff, nurses, and doctors are valiantly giving their lives to save the victims of the virus, but sacrifice is not bright hope. Volunteers distribute food to the distressed and help in many ways, and philanthropists donate billions, but this is only more sacrifice. The necessity of sacrifice drives me to despair, not hope.

Then what good do I see? Change. Change for the better paid for with staggering suffering and cost. Hundreds of thousands of good people forced to die alone with a tube jammed down their throat. Myriads of others who will survive with lame spirits and weakened bodies.

You may lament the shattering of the economy, but I see an economy that was already broken with unseen cracks. We were living in a condition that we now know humans cannot survive. The death toll from the virus testifies to this. If we lived differently, flew around in airplanes less, did not live in cities stacked in layers, looked out for our neighbors instead of competed with them, used computer networks, the mark of the new century, to protect ourselves from pestilence and bring us together instead letting them divide us, the emergence of the virus would have been a minor event. A temporary statistical variation that only epidemiologists and public health specialists would notice.

But the pandemic isn’t minor. It is a catastrophe because we have been doing it all wrong.

Now we know.

Will we have a better world when this is over? I think so. World War II was a horrible event, more destructive than the pandemic. After the war, many people were dead like today, but cities were also flattened, industrial facilities devastated, and resources destroyed.

Yet, the world that emerged from the war was more prosperous, more pleasant, more humane than ever existed before on the planet.

After the pandemic, we will have the dead to bury and grieve, but our resources and infrastructure will be intact, and we will have learned much about the weaknesses in our old ways. We will know new ways to work, to live, to cooperate.

Already, the network has been strengthened in just two months to support the new loads and will continue to get stronger. We’ve learned to get together electronically in ways that the virus can’t disrupt. And we will learn more. New ways to work and distribute goods. Our communities will be stronger and more resistant to stress.

Rebuilding will be rapid because we will have so much to rebuild with, and like the aftermath of the war, the world will improve in ways we do not yet comprehend.

Posted on

How Will the Pandemic Feel?

Today, I am trying to grapple with how the COVID-19 pandemic will feel here in Ferndale. The schools and the public libraries are closing. The stock market is thrashing. But the sun shining. It’s a loser’s game because predicting the future has never worked out well for me, but I keep trying.

People are confused by large numbers. I see this when I talk to people about computer security and I see confusion in the way people talk and react to COVID-19. And I feel it in myself when I look at the numbers on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Hoard toilet paper? You gotta do something. Right?

No. Calm down.

Look at the coronavirus numbers. They are terrifying. I’m looking at 162,687 confirmed cases and 6,065 deaths. 3,244 cases in the U.S., 40 deaths in Washington State. By the time anyone reads this, those numbers will almost certainly be much higher. They grew in the hour I took writing this. The president has called a national emergency. The administration, congress, states, cities, and local health departments appear to be struggling to respond.

To get a sense of perspective, I have turned to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919, a century ago. Spanish flu is a misnomer. No one knows where it came from. Xenophobia is nothing new.

Remember that in 1919, DNA and genetic sequencing were unknown concepts, penicillin was 20 years in the future; scientists would not discover that the flu was caused by a virus until the 1930s. They were guessing at how the disease moved from person to person. Although epidemiologists today don’t have all the details on COVID-19, we know so much more than we did in 1918 when the Spanish flu first appeared in the U.S. Vaccines and medicines to control and treat COVID-19 are not available yet, but the tools scientists have today to develop these remedies would not exist for 90 years after the Spanish flu appeared.

We are in a world’s better position to respond to COVID-19 than Spanish flu. When it appeared, the Brits were still launching cavalry charges. It’s no stretch to say that the 1919 pandemic response compared to the science of 2020 epidemiology in like matching a horse charge against a squad of Humvees backed by drones. A different world. That is not to say COVID-19 will be a walk in the park, but the 1919 pandemic is a worst-case, not an inevitable reality. It tells us about what could happen if we ignore the science.

What did happen in 1918-1919? The Spanish flu was first detected in the U.S. in March of 1919. By the spring of 1919, a little over a year later, April 1919, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed at the Versailles Peace Conference, presumably from the flu. He recovered but 675,000 American died in the pandemic. That’s roughly 600 per 100,000 people.

To put this in a local perspective, if the 1919 pandemic were repeated, roughly a hundred people would die in the small city of Ferndale. That’s highly unlikely to happen, but it would mean the current death rate in the U.S. would a little less than double.

Think about how that would feel. I’m old, over 70. Three people close to me have died in the past few years: a cousin and two close friends. All in the demographic most likely to die from COVID-19. I don’t think that is out of line for most people my age. How would I feel if that number doubled? Sad, of course. But terrified? No. I have many, many cherished relatives and friends. It’s the ones who survive that count.

We are likely to be in for a tough time ahead, but only a few will be taken down. Hold on tight folks. Keep your social distance. We now know that will blunt the force of the disease. It’s going to be okay.

And quit hoarding toilet paper.